The summer can be a slow time in the business world, but that doesn’t appear to be the case in the Pacific Northwest startup community.
Numerous startups in Seattle and Portland are putting to work investment dollars they have landed over the last few months, shooting them up the GeekWire 200 list of privately held Pacific Northwest startups, presented by EY. This means plenty of new products, as well as even more tech jobs in a region already teeming with tech activity.
Real estate company Redfin, which took over the top spot on the GeekWire 200 from DocuSign for the first time last month, hung on to number one in June. Rounding out the top five are Avalara, Blue Origin and Puppet. Other movers at the top include Vacasa, up a single spot to number eight, and K2, the enterprise technology company, which jumped back into the top 10 this month.
Click for the full June update to the GeekWire 200 and continue reading for highlights and an explanation of the GeekWire 200 methodology.
It may not be long before Rover.com graduates from the GeekWire 200 via an IPO, but for now it continues to climb up the list, cracking the top 20 after moving six spots to number 19. In March, Rover acquired DogVacay, its biggest competitor in the online dog-sitting marketplace. Since then it has been moving up our charts.
Rover started as a fun project born at a Startup Weekend event but has turned into a potential billion-dollar company. Last year it raised a $40 million in a Series E round, bringing the company to total funding to date for Rover to $91.5 million. Today its employee count, according to LinkedIn, sits at 230, up from 170 at the time of the big funding round last October.
Seattle startup Highspot just completed a $15 million fundraising round this month, and it is up 10 spots to number 126 on the GeekWire 200.
The company is working on artificial intelligence models to predict which pieces of content will be most effective for pitching customers on products or services, and also help managers understand which content strategies aren’t paying off. With this new funding round, Highspot plans to scale up these AI products and strengthen its engineering, marketing, and sales departments.
School may be out for summer but that hasn’t slowed down Portland-based Lumen Learning, which rose 10 spots on the list to number 165. In April, the company announced a $3.75 million Series A investment round and a new partnership with Follett to expand the distribution of its open digital education course materials.
Founded in 2012 by Kim Thanos and David Wiley, Lumen Learning helps students at more than 100 institutions save on traditional textbook costs by offering open education resources (OER) for popular college courses. OER are available under public domain or have been released under a copyright license and include full courses, course materials, videos, tests, and more.
Here are some of the other big movers this month:
- OpenSesame, up 11 spots to number 73
- Transform, Inc., up 11 spots to number 103
- CrowdStreet, up 15 spots to number 122
- Azuqua, up 10 spots to number 147
- Textio, up 10 spots to number to number 161
- Karat, up 15 spots to number 178
- Entomo, up 10 spots to number 189
Nine startups made their debut on the GeekWire 200 or returned to the list in June. They are: Outdoor Project, Resin.io, VIAR, Code Fellows, FanWide, Rival IQ, Amplero, DefenseStorm and Human.
Several startups saw a larger than normal spike this month due to data adjustments and fixes on our end, including: LoginRadius, Valant, PicoBrew, Sheerid, Qorus, Cozy, Stay Alfred, Hubb, Lighter capital, Resin.io
The GeekWire 200 — sponsored by our partners at EY — is derived from our broader list of more than 900 Pacific Northwest tech startups. The list is designed to provide a better understanding of the startup landscape in the Northwest. The rankings are generated from publicly available data, including social media followings, approximate employee counts (via LinkedIn) and inbound web links.
To make sure your startup is eligible for inclusion in the GeekWire 200, first make sure it’s included in the broader Startup List. If so, there’s no need to submit it separately for the GeekWire 200. If your Pacific Northwest startup isn’t among the companies on that larger list, you can submit it for inclusion here, and our algorithm will crunch the numbers to see if your company makes next month’s GeekWire 200. (Please, no service providers, marketing agencies, etc.)
Thanks to everyone for checking out this month’s ranking. And, just a reminder, if you value resources like these, be sure to check out our list and map of out-of-town tech companies with Seattle engineering outposts as well as our list of startup incubators, co-working spaces and accelerators in the region, and our GeekWork job board.
